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There is a common tale about the rise of the United States after World War II premised on the assumption of American exceptionalism. Presumably, the United States emerged from the war as a benevolent, anti-imperial hegemon. Working from its own deep anti-imperial and democratic values, it pushed the European empires to dismantle and valiantly inaugurated a new global order of open trade, national sovereignty, and freedom. Matching its high morals to its new economic and industrial power, the United States became a new “antiimperial ” liberal empire, marking an imperial transition from the decaying old world of repression to the bright new world of liberty and freedom. This exceptionalism narrative is deep. It is entailed in popular and scholarly discourse alike. It is found, for instance, in George W. Bush’s assertion that “America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.” It is found, too, in the historian Jeremi Suri’s claim that the United States has been an “anti-empire” guided by “American claims to freedom and opposition to empire.”1 This essay reconsiders the narrative of transition that the story of American exceptionalism implies. First, it is not the case that American global power after World War II was anti-imperial. In fact, the United States itself was an empire, just a different type than traditional territorial empires. In this new “American way of empire,” as Thomas Bender has called it, indirect rule and influence replaced colonialism and military bases, client states, and financial aid replaced pith helmets, jodhpurs, and rajas.2 Harry Magdoff initially called this “imperialism without colonies.”3 More recently, others have relabeled it “empire by remote control” or “nonterritorial imperialism.”4 As the essay by Gregory Barton in this volume suggests, another term that might be used for this is informal imperialism. Entangled Empires The United States and European Imperial Formations in the Mid-Twentieth Century julian go  Second, the transition from the European empires of the early twentieth century to the new American empire was not a tidy affair. As Alfred McCoy suggests in the introduction to this volume, scholars should keep in mind that imperial transitions are often marked by continuity as well as change. In this spirit, the present essay shows that the rise of the new U.S. empire was at first dependent on the European empires it presumably opposed. Rather than a simple transition from dying European empires to a new American empire, there was a tangled web of interimperial relations, forces, and networks between them.5 And when this network of empires began to break down, the transition to America’s informal empire did not occur by means of the valiant agency of the United States alone. It was rather effected by the agency of the very peripheral peoples that the empires, both old and new, sought to subdue. When the United States did take an anti-imperial stance, it was not because of its anticolonial liberal values but because the new global climate and American pragmatism demanded it to be so. The Age of Imperialism Has Ended? It is unsurprising that World War II has been taken as a monumental turning point away from Europe as the center of global power based on colonial empires and toward the new American informal empire. World War II weakened the old order. It devastated Europe’s economies, unsettled colonial institutions, and thus contributed to the decolonization of long-standing colonies such as India and Indonesia. Still, the colonial empires did not just disappear. As late as , the colonies and trusteeships of the five major European powers—Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom—numbered eightyfive separate territorial units. Those units covered . million square miles and held more than  million people.6 How and why? The traditional narrative of American exceptionalism implies that the United States—supposedly anti-imperial in character, given its exceptional history of anticolonial revolution and democratic development—pushed European powers to decolonize their empires. After all, Sumner Welles had declared that “the age of imperialism had ended” in . In January of , President Franklin D. Roosevelt articulated lofty anticolonial principles in his “Four Freedoms” speech, speaking of a new world order portending the United Nations.7 Yet part of the reason why the colonial empires were still alive and well in  was because of U.S. support rather than in spite of it. Washington supported the European empires...

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